Whilst Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles range was originally conceived with a view to telling traditional stories from the perspective of the first four Doctors’ companions, over its six seasons it has evolved to encompass adventures that are every bit as reminiscent of the current television series as they are the old black-and-white Hartnells that spawned it, which from my standpoint makes them compulsively appealing. And just like The Perpetual Bond and The Cold Equations before it, The First Wave is a case in point.
Now ‘linear’ isn’t a word that you’ll see often thrown about when discussing the plot of a Doctor Who story, but if you study the series’ earliest episodes, they customarily followed a linear narrative; hell, they were even shot that way in the beginning. In direct defiance of this, Simon Guerrier’s script opens with a cliffhanging pre-title sequence that Steven Moffat would be proud of, sucking the listener into what feels very much like a typical second episode – at least, for a while. Like a Whovian Tarantino shooting in a darkened room, Guerrier dramatically segues between two-hand audio drama and descriptive rewinds. Those who favour listening to their Big Finish productions whilst serenely lying down can forget about it; The First Wave’s ceaseless suspense will have you fidgeting at the very least.
The preceding adventure for this TARDIS crew did a lovely job of setting up the predestination paradox that Guerrier’s plot centres around, and this one does an even better job of bringing it to the boil without rehearsing too much of The Space Museum and other stories of the same ilk. Furthermore, as with his last Companion Chronicles trilogy, Guerrier resurrects an antagonist from the television series to lend his final instalment a little extra lustre – this time around, it’s the Vardans of The Invasion of Time fame (or, perhaps more aptly, infamy). A loose prequel to the 1970s Tom Baker serial, The First Wave presents the Vardans perhaps as they should have been seen on television – as terrifying, omnipresent creatures that can travel along any form of wave – even a brainwave – and thus from whom there can be no escape. Divorced from the appallingly banal visuals of The Invasion of Time and embellished by the mid-GCSE writer’s foundation level science, the Vardans have at last found their perfect home amongst this production’s soundwaves.
As with its two predecessors, I found the most enthralling segments of this story to be those that simply see Peter Purves play Steven and Tom Allen play Oliver. To say that this is Oliver’s final turn, Guerrier’s script is exceedingly kind to his space pilot cohort, building upon the six-dimensional groundwork laid in The Cold Equations by having him step up the plate in the Doctor’s absence, drawing upon his wartime experiences to help guide his judgement and steel his stomach. The former Blue Peter man and I’m Alan Partridge joke-butt gives a duly stirring performance as his character deals with his mentor’s apparent demise as well as his and his remaining friend’s apparently-inexorable fate (and indeed the pending subjugation of all time and space by the Vardans), and once more he makes for a credible first Doctor to boot. In my reviews of previous Purves-led Companion Chronicles for The History of the Doctor, I wore out my lexicon trying to describe just how evocative his portrayal of Hartnell’s Doctor is, so this time around I’ll just quote the man himself: “I do a mean Doctor,” says he. And so he does.
Oliver is again engrossing too, this story (and particularly its dénouement) ably demonstrating how much the character has matured since we first met him fleeing arrest in his native 1960s. I won’t spoil his fate for those yet to hear it, save for to say that I was very impressed with how both Guerrier’s writing and Allen’s portrayal brought out the emotional logic in Oliver’s psychology. For those that thought The Cold Equations had blown the lid on why Oliver was so keen to flee Earth with the Doctor and Steven at the end of The Perpetual Bond, you might be aware of the facts, but the real heartbreak lies in Oliver’s interpretation of them; in the stain of criminality that his vanity can’t abide, no matter how unjust the laws that would condemn him. It’s his desperate evasion of this stigma that drives him to join the Doctor and Steven aboard the TARDIS, and eventually leads him to the (beautifully-named) planetoid Grace Alone, where his already-written fate awaits him.
Like a lot of listeners, I doubted that Guerrier would ever surpass his Sara Kingdom stories, but with the trilogy that The First Wave crowns, I think that he just might have. Bringing a character back from the dead as a house suddenly doesn’t seem quite so inventive when it’s measured against teaming up the ascetic first Doctor with a bowler hat-doffing gay banker who’s more afraid of a criminal record than he is alien monsters and outer space.
The First Wave is available to download from Big Finish for just £7.99. The CD version (which also comes with a free download) is just a pound extra.
The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. It's a bad place to grow up.
The colony has been plagued by problems. Maybe it’s just gremlins, just bad luck. But the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing, and there have been stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel.
Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn’s rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.
Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation - and they are suspected by some as the source of the sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all.
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